Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Let's Suppose....

Three days before a category 5 hurricane, drawing a beeline on New Orleans: Buses are readied, doctors are gathered. US Navy hospital ships are dispatched to the Gulf and US military bases are prepared for an influx of refugees. National Guard and Reserve troops are deployed to the NOLA area, complete with all necessary equipment. People are evacuted ahead of the storm. The storm prep, complete, executed with a respectable level of efficiency in front of the storm, costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the hours before landfall, the hurricane shifts courses, east, and while causing damage to the Mississippi coastline, which benefits from the storm prep, NOLA is not destroyed, the levees do not break, the city does not become a pestilential bog.

Can't you imagine that the fury on the Right over this stupendous waste of federal and state dollars would dWarf their crocodile-teared fury over the destruction of NOLA - which is solely based on saving Maximum Leader Nero's ass. Conservatives would jump on the mustering of state and federal assets as proof that state and federal assets are used as patronage by Liberals (pandering to the blacks, don't you know) and demand more tax cuts (well, they're still calling for more tax cuts even after Katrina, so...).

And they would work to ensure that such preparations would never happen again. They would continue to cut funding for basic infrastructure improvements - including levee rehabilitation. They would use the hurricane's near miss to undermine efforts to prevent the disaster that DID happen, unfortunately this time, in the future.